AWS Announces Availability of its Application Delivery Service

Amazon Web Services has announced the general availability of AWS Proton, an application delivery service that makes it easier for customers to provision, deploy and monitor the micro-services that form the basis of modern container and server-less applications. With AWS Proton, a customer’s infrastructure team creates standard application stacks defining the architecture, infrastructure resources, CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) pipeline and observability tools - and then makes these stacks available to their developers. Developers can use AWS Proton’s self-service interface to select an application stack for use with their code. AWS Proton automatically provisions the resources for the selected application stack, deploys the code and sets up monitoring so developers can begin building server-less and container applications without having to learn, configure, or maintain the underlying resources. There are no upfront commitments or fees to use AWS Proton, and customers pay only for the AWS services used to create, scale, and run their applications.

Container and server-less applications improve an organisation’s agility and reduce their operational burden; however, they also change the way customers deploy and manage their code. Today, when developers build traditional applications on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, the applications are often built as a single block of code and there are well-established tools that help them develop and deploy their code - like AWS CloudFormation templates (to provision the infrastructure), AWS CodePipeline (to set up the CI/CD process), and Amazon CloudWatch (to monitor the deployments). Once customers get an application up and running on Amazon EC2, the components of the application typically don’t change very much. For these applications, the code is usually maintained in a single release, so keeping it coordinated is relatively easy.

By contrast, container and server-less applications are assembled from multiple smaller chunks of code (micro-services), which are often developed and maintained independently and then stitched together to build and scale an application. Each micro-service has its own separate infrastructure, code templates, CI/CD pipelines, and monitoring that must be updated and maintained. Often, these micro-services are developed and operated by different teams, so those teams have the freedom to update the components at their own pace. This results in changes happening more frequently than with traditional applications. As customers have increasingly adopted container and server-less applications, they have found that managing hundreds, or even thousands, of micro-services with constantly changing and disparate infrastructure resources, code deployments, and monitoring tools can be a challenging task for even the most capable teams. Customers lack an integrated solution that ties together all the tasks, including resource provisioning, code deployments, and monitoring. Central infrastructure teams try to provide guidance to their developers, and some have even built their own custom tools to help developers implement best practices. However, for many organizations, the intricacies of coordinating the development and deployment of container and server-less applications can negatively impact quality and security, and can slow down application development and container and server-less adoption.

AWS Proton is an application delivery service that helps platform teams provide an easy way for their developers to provision, deploy and monitor applications when the unit of compute is dynamic, like with containers and server-less. This application delivery service allows customers to define application components as a stack, which creates everything needed to provision, deploy and monitor an application, including compute, networking, code pipeline, security, and monitoring. AWS Proton includes curated application stacks with built-in AWS best practices (for security, architecture, and tools), so infrastructure teams can quickly and easily distribute trusted stacks to their development teams. A customer’s central infrastructure team can easily create and publish a stack to the AWS application delivery console. The stack defines all of the infrastructure and tooling for the micro-service and provides consistency and standards across the organisation. When a developer is ready to deploy their code, they pick the stack that best suits their use case, plug in the parameters for their application, and click deploy. AWS application delivery service handles everything needed to deploy the application, including provisioning the requested AWS services, pushing code through the CI/CD pipeline, setting up monitoring and alarms, and compiling, testing and deploying the code. The AWS Proton console lists the micro-services that are using each stack, so it is easy for infrastructure teams to make sure all micro-services are updated as needed. With AWS Proton, infrastructure teams can also easily manage their container and server-less deployments and focus on creating great applications - instead of spending hours setting up infrastructure for each development team.

“Customers have told us that while they love the operational benefits that container and server-less applications provide, it is incredibly challenging to scale these architectures across their organizations because of the many manual tasks involved in deploying apps that use micro-services,” said Deepak Singh, VP, Compute Services, AWS. “AWS application delivery service brings together customers’ infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipeline and observability into a single interface, so developers can quickly go from code in a repo to a production application. Developers rely on AWS Proton’s self-service capabilities to deploy code quickly and securely without having to become experts on each of the underlying services involved, while the central infrastructure team can be assured that the apps deployed by their developers using AWS Proton meet the standards they have set for their business.”

AWS application delivery service is available today in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) with additional region availability coming soon.

Rackspace Technology is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner that helps companies design and build scalable solutions for the future. “As part of Rackspace Technology's mission to help customers innovate in the cloud, we're often helping them find the balance between standardization and experimentation,” said Amir Kashani, VP, Cloud Native Development & IoT, Rackspace. “We're excited about AWS Proton, which provides a cloud-native way for administrative teams to define infrastructure and service standards without removing the self-service AWS access that enables developer innovation. We're looking forward to leveraging AWS Proton as another tool to help our joint customers on their cloud journey.”

Altoros has built its business migrating customers to the Cloud. “A challenge we see customers facing is the static nature of the solutions they engineer. AWS Proton offers our joint customers an abstraction layer to expose the options development teams need and central management tools. AWS Proton provides a way to get the security and governance benefits of a repeatable abstraction without turning over the keys to an account,” said Tony Hansmann, CTO, Cloud Orchestration, Altoros. “We work with customers to deliver infrastructure-as-code, which is a great set of practices, however, as the cloud team becomes successful they become oversubscribed and hit their scaling limit. Because of AWS application delivery service's reusability, template making and above all, meaningful versioning, we can now offer a way past that bottleneck.”

nClouds is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner that collaborates with their customers to build and manage modern infrastructure solutions that deliver innovation faster. “As we migrate more workloads to micro-services, we’re providing ways to help customers manage the growing complexity of their infrastructure,” said JT Giri, CEO & Co-founder, nClouds. “We are excited to leverage AWS Proton to help customers enforce best practices and increase developer productivity in their modern operations.”

2nd Watch provides best-in-class professional services and managed cloud services to enable enterprise clients to transform and evolve their businesses through cloud native capabilities. “AWS Proton is a first stop for organizations evaluating how to implement a modern, robust, self-service framework underpinning a modern cloud operations approach,” said Chris Garvey, EVP, Cloud Services, 2nd Watch. “AWS Proton supports the centralized infrastructure team’s mission of ensuring proper standardization, optimization, and best practices, while enabling development teams to deploy application code efficiently across different infrastructure services and environments. We are excited to support AWS Proton as part of our Modern Cloud Enablement offering that assists clients on their path towards modernisation.”

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